Sinabro: Beliefs

I have always believed that my beliefs are personal and not to be spoken of publicly. Nontheless, here is one exception.

I believe freedom to be the most fundamental human right. However, even in the West, intellectual freedom, namely, freedom of information and free speech are under constant attack, under different guises. These are some materials that might get you up to speed.

• Right to Read: A classic account of a world gone wrong. And the real world is catching up pretty quickly.
• Can You Trust Your Computer?: Treacherous Computing is a real problem, and if we do not stop it now, while there is some competition in the hardware business and we can still boycott those who supported this affront to freedom, it will be too late.
• When Non-Free is "Free Enough": It's easy to forget that free software movement is a movement. It's not enough for software to be distributed gratis. Free software (that guarantees the four freedoms) needs to be so pervasive in our society and create such an environment where a proprietary software has neither the support of the public nor the library routines to stand on. A first step towards this utopia is shunning proprietary software that pretends to be free software.

How to get started

Your freedom is held hostage, as long as the software, which is becoming greater part of everyone's life every day, remains proprietary, in control of corporation that can and are too willing to take away your freedom in the name of profit. The first step to ensuring your intellectual freedom is using an operating system that is really free.

Just like you had to learn to use the proprietary operating system, figuring out the nooks and crannies of the operating system, you will have to learn to use the free operating systems. If you are coming from a Unix environment (such as Solaris), there is practically nothing more that you will need to know. If you are coming from Windows or even Mac OS, there might be a slightly steeper curve, but there are distributions (distros) of the free operating system, the most widely used being GNU/Linux, that is literally no harder to install than Windows, and perhaps takes an extra day or two to get used to.

I personally use Debian, because I feel that it walks on a very fine line that balances the free software philosophy with practicality. Some people I really admire (like rms) are not too fond of Debian because of its non-free section. If you feel strongly about it and are committed enough to endure some inconvenience, gNewSense (again, based on Debian) may be for you, but this is a relatively new (derivative) distro (of Debian), and may have some quirks here and there. In recent years Ubuntu has gotten popular, but there are some problems with it from philosophical point of view, and the difference in the ease of use between Debian and Ubuntu is really minimal at most, and ease of use is something that Debian continues to improve upon release after release—and don't forget: Debian (stable) is more stable and doesn't include ridiculous local root exploits (which will allow a normal user to gain administrator privilege) that Ubuntu used to ship with.